Best ways to come up with melodys?

Hey guys, so I have recently had a problem coming up with a melodys, and I wanted to see if you guys have any tips on how to come up with one.

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mess around until you get something good. Sorry i don’t really have much advice to give on this topic because i don’t even do music.

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All good, thats for your suggestion :slight_smile:

You could try listening to your favorite songs to get some form of inspiration. If you play an instrument, use chords, scales and even chromatics.

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Often, the best melodies aren’t written as melodies at all, but are actually notes taken from a chord progression with Non-Chord Tones(NCTs). Most pop songs are actually just singing the root or fifth of the harmonizing chord and notes that are a halfstep away.

If you really want to compose your own melody without writing a harmony, the easiest way to do it is to stay diatonic, or in the key of the song. That means no sharps, and no flats.

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I think @CaptLincoln said it the best! Personally when I get stuck at a specific point in a song, I try to arpeggiate the chord that the song is in at that point.

So to verbally demonstrate let’s say that I have a song that follows a II-V-I-VI progression in the key of D minor, and I’m trying to find a melody for the 2nd bar(which falls on the V chord). Since the V(fifth scale degree) chord of the D natural minor scale is Am, I would play the notes that make up Am in an ascending order. So the notes would be A,C,E.

This should probably give you a technical starting point, but as @DudeWithNoNa said its best to mess around until you get something that you’re satisfied with.
:slight_smile:

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Mess around on a keyboard until you get something you like. I usually just get an idea and recreate it, but that’s make complicated.

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I usually start with the rhythm coming up with melodies, since its the voice that drives the piece. I think that gets a good bit of the character down, and from there I mess with notes to get something I like.

Best way to start is probably finding the defining beats of the melody you might have in your head and going from there.

But if ya got nothing, then messing around like said above is actually pretty surprising at times for finding something cool.

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Record simple four note bass line.
Practice by making hundreds of different melodies to that bass line.

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Personally people here already told to mess around and follow the chord progression. Still following the rule, i would like to propose using “weird” chords such as Diminish or augments, especially on the end of the melody, to give off feeling of a satisfying closure.

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Sit down at a keyboard, find a scale you like, and tap away.

Experiment with pitchbends and etc to see what effects you can make.